Native American Research and Dioramas; Seminoles DBQ

I divided my two classes into five Florida Native American Tribes. Each tribe had about a month to collect the information for the research paper. Each student presented a diorama about the tribe he or she was assigned to. I also worked with the students on the essay about their tribe. The whole project was fascinating!!!!! Our last Thursday before Thanksgiving we celebrated with the great Native American Gathering, where the students presented their dioramas and we danced with the Native American Indians in a circle of "PEACE" :0)

Since I also wanted to model how to really conduct a research to my class, I was working on a DBQ "Seminole's Resistance" together with both classes during my reading block at the same time as the students were working on theirs at home. I made the documents into large colorful posters that the students could relate to and see clear details. I also modeled the process of a DBQ study. As a final product, we wrote an informational essay about Seminole resistance. This way the students were exposed to the proper way of writing an informational essay prior to submitting their own. We worked on good introduction, evidence and elaboration, and also strong conclusion. I also focused this time on encouraging the class to refer to the documents that they were drawing the evidence from. Well... we still need to improve in this area :0).

Owl Pellet Dissection

It was soo wonderful to be able to host our own "Science Lab" :0)!!!!! We had fun dissecting the owl pellets and documenting our research. As a final product, we made our Owl Research Banners :0).

Core Connection Fun Way of Writing Group Essays :0) Informational Text

This is a great way to model good writing. Since I teach two classes this year, I will share two essays that I wrote as a group work with my students. We worked paragraph by paragraph, and I only released sections that both classes completed that day. It took two days to accomplish our "Class Essay". Each group took pride in what they wrote and made a point to read and learn from each other. 

I was actually doing a remedial work in teaching elaboration for both groups :0).

Lesson using the Guided Tri-folds :0)

Here is an example how I use my Guided Tri-folds during the Reading Block when I am introducing the main reading strategies for the week. Personally, I take two days to complete these section of my lesson because I want to establish a good foundation for the rest of the week's material. I am working on "chunking" the material. Such breaking of the content really made a difference in my instruction :0).

Text Based Evidence Writing with Poetry

We have been working on this most amazing training specifically geared to teach good writing skills. This lesson is based on the theme of "Heroes". We read two informational stories: "Five Traits of a Hero" and a biography of Fred Richardson Jr. After reading the biography article, we stated the main idea of the story, and also did the sort. Such activity helped the students create the mental picture of their writing plan, which they later used to write their own essays. While introducing the sort, I also used three different colors of pocket charts to help the students visualize "paragraphs" :0) and... "indentation" :0). Yes, I am smiling while writing because both concepts are rather difficult at the beginning of the year in the 4th grade :0)
After writing the essays, my most amazing volunteer and a poet Mrs. Gilligan wrote a poem with both classes which was dedicated specifically to Doctor Fred Richardson Jr. from Chicago.